Supermassive Games Begins Third Round of Layoffs, Cutting Up to 75 Staff

Supermassive Games, the BAFTA-winning studio behind Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology, has begun a redundancy consultation process that is expected to result in the loss of up to 75 employees. The studio announced the cuts on X, describing them as "a necessary step to help ensure the sustainability of the company" (Engadget).

This is the studio's third round of layoffs in roughly two and a half years. Supermassive cut around 90 workers in February 2024 and approximately 35 jobs in July 2025 (Engadget). Game Developer and IGN both characterize the current round as the studio's third in three years (Game Developer; IGN).

The scale of the latest cut is significant relative to headcount. As of the end of 2025, Supermassive had 172 employees (Engadget). A reduction of 75 from that base would represent roughly 44% of the workforce, bringing the studio down to around 97 staff, though the consultation process may ultimately affect fewer than the maximum.

According to IGN, the layoffs followed a mixed critical response to Directive 8020, a title Supermassive had been developing and which released earlier in 2025 (IGN). Former CEO Robert Henrysson stepped down in June 2025, weeks after that release (Engadget). The studio's most recent release, per its own homepage, is Little Nightmares III.

Supermassive built its reputation on cinematic, branching-narrative horror titles. Until Dawn (2015) established the formula: player choices carrying genuine consequences across an ensemble cast, with high-production-value performance capture and a B-movie sensibility. The Dark Pictures Anthology expanded that model into a serialized format, and The Quarry further refined it. The studio earned a BAFTA for its work in this space.

The pattern at Supermassive fits a broader industry contraction that has been underway since early 2023, though the verified facts here are specific to this studio. What distinguishes the Supermassive situation is the compounding frequency: three rounds of cuts in roughly 30 months, each following the last without an apparent stabilization point. A studio that employed 172 people at the end of 2025 and had already shed roughly 125 positions across prior rounds is operating in a fundamentally different mode than it was even two years ago.

The connection IGN draws between the mixed reception of Directive 8020 and the latest cuts is worth noting. Supermassive's model depends on each title performing well enough to justify the next installment in an anthology or standalone structure. A soft critical and presumably commercial response to a new IP entry places pressure on the studio's pipeline at exactly the moment when headcount has already been reduced to a level that may constrain concurrent development. The departure of the CEO weeks after that release adds another variable.

One open question is what Supermassive's reduced headcount means for its announced and unannounced projects. The studio's homepage listed Directive 8020 as in development, but its release earlier in 2025 means the current pipeline is not fully visible from public information. Little Nightmares III shipped as the latest title. Whether the studio can sustain its multi-project, anthology-style development approach with a workforce potentially under 100 people is a structural question that the consultation outcome will help answer.

The redundancy consultation process itself is a UK employment procedure, reflecting Supermassive's status as a British studio. Consultation periods are designed to explore alternatives to dismissal and to determine selection criteria, and the final number of departures may settle below the stated maximum of 75. The studio framed the process as necessary for long-term sustainability, language that has become standard across the industry but that, in Supermassive's case, carries the weight of repeated use.

In this author's view, the compounding nature of these cuts is the detail that warrants attention. Individual layoff announcements, however painful, have become a familiar cadence in game development over the past three years. A studio reducing its headcount by nearly half across three successive rounds, following a leadership change and a mixed-reception release, is navigating something more sustained than a single-cycle downturn. Whether the current round achieves the stability that the prior two did not is the question that will define Supermassive's next chapter.